Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Sunday, March 27, 2016

HUSKER DU

Melody Maker, June 27th 1987

by Simon Reynolds

In Atlanta, Georgia, the Replacements play me a tape of Husker Du’s live appearance on The JoanRivers Show. It’s more than a little mind-blowing. The band unleash the great grey gust that is ‘Could You Be The One’, then troop over for a ‘chat’ with the lady herself.

It’s one of the most embarrassing pieces of television I’ve ever seen. Rivers is clearly terrified of the band, doesn’t know how to place or approach them, stammers out something to the effect that they used to be kind of radical and underground, but now aren’t quite so radical and underground, isn’t that so?

What’s unnerving her is that the band aren’t selling themselves on any level, either as outrage or as light entertainment, aren’t making anything of this opportunity to project themselves. They’re polite, awkward, somehow not-there. It’s not so much that they’re deliberately aloof as that they’re irretrievably apart. Rivers asks a question and I think she’s saying: "Which one of you is the wild member of the group and which is the commie one?" – turns out she said "calming". Then they traipse off again, to play ‘She’s A Woman’, having left an irreparable crease in the sleek fabric of the show.

It made me wonder whether a group like Husker Du can interact with this thing Pop. The Smiths, at least, make a drama of their exile – their anti-glamour can be consumed as glamour.

But Husker Du refuse to act up – the ‘outrage’ they perpetrated on Joan Rivers was of an altogether quieter, less ostentatious order – they didn’t play up to the role of Misfit, they just failed to connect, to communicate on Pop’s terms at all – an eloquent incoherence. How, then, do they cope with things like videos?

Grant Hart: "The videos are of straight performances of the songs. Seeing as none of our songs are particularly etched in fantasy, they’re best portrayed naturalistically."

Like the other American thinking rock bands I’ve encountered (Throwing Muses and The Replacements) Husker Du loathe the exigencies of presentation and marketing, have a chronic fear of anything that suggests contrivance. American rock has never seen image and packaging as a means of expression in the way that much British rock has.

Perhaps this is because American daily life is more heavily saturated with showbiz glitz and advertising pizazz than British life, and so it seems more urgent to escape the all-pervasive environment of kitsch, escape from the escapist, into the authentic, the Real. Probably, it has a lot to do with the absence in America of the artschool/artrock interface that’s has been so hugely important in British pop history.

Either way, American rock (outside New York) has no notion of glamour as something you can radicalise: Throwing Muses will turn up for photo sessions in their tattiest, most everyday clothes, The Replacements will refuse to throw shapes for the camera and Husker Du will resist anything in the way of video presentation that’s redolent of advertising and its manipulation of the consumer.

Bob Mould: "The problem with videos is that, before they existed, you’d make up your own story, your own mental pictures, to go with a song. That’s what music’s for – attaching your own meanings to."

Somewhere along the way, pop ceased to be something that gave people a heightened sense of their own agency, and became something that programmed desires. What Husker Du hate above all is when things get fixed – they like to leave things open, in a flux. Maybe they’d get on better if they did give people one easy handle, if they weren’t so keen to leave things up to people’s imagination. Maybe the only way to get a hit is to work from the premise that most people’s imaginations are enfeebled, through under-use. As it is, they’re not even let near those kind of people.

Bob: "Our videos don’t get heavy rotation. Our records get played on college radio and on the progressive commercial radio stations. Whereas all the people in here - " (gestures at Billboard) "- get played several times a day on every radio station in America."

Ah, Billboard – whenever I look at magazines like Billboard or Music Week, it does my head in: I think of all the things that music means to me – dissension, speculation, complex pleasures, never-never dreams, the criss-cross currents of making sacred and sacrilege – and then look at how these people discuss pop – crossover between different radio sectors, aggressive marketing, instore promotion... Who knows which kind of talk is more out of touch with the ‘reality’ of pop.

"Well, yes, it all depends on whether your conception of success is related to the outside world or to your own mind. With us, it ‘s the latter, so every song is a ‘hit’."

Quite. What is a ‘hit’ these days? Something that wreaks havoc in the private lives of a few people, or something that resounds widely and weakly across the surfaces of the globe? We’re back with Stubbs’ dichotomy between the small and significant and "huge insignificances" like Alison Moyet or Curiosity Killed The Cat. Two rival definitions of impact – purity of vision or breadth of effect.

All I know is that Husker Du hit me – this feels like the elusive ‘perfect pop’, the swoon and the surge. In one sense (sales) Husker Du are a ‘small’ band – in every other sense they are massive – in the scale and reach of their music, in the way they give a grandeur to mundane tribulations and quandaries – a musical equivalent of the pathetic fallacy (thunder and lightning as the dramatic externalisation of inner turmoil).

What is it about this ‘perfect pop’ that dooms it to be as distant from real Eighties Pop as the moon? That the music is too imposing, while the band, as individuals are too self-effacing, hiding behind the noise? That the music’s too violent, while the feelings that inspire it are too sensitive. That the songs deal with the loose ends of life but refuse to tie things up satisfactorily, instead confronting the listener again and again with the insoluble?

All these things distance Husker Du from today’s secular pop, with its twin poles of levity and sentimentality. But there are more material reasons why they don’t belong. The very fabric of their sound has no place in pop ’87, a blizzard that makes no appeal to the dancing body, but dances in the head.

Move in close and you see activity too furious for pop – flurry-hurry chords, febrile drumming – step back ten paces and you can take in the sweep and curve of the cloud shapes stirred up by the frenzy. Only AR Kane come close as sublime choreographers of harmonic haze. The stricken voices, the almost unbearable candour of their bewilderment and desolation, jar with Pop’s soul-derived universal voice of self-possession and narcissism.

‘Ice Cold Ice’, the fabulous new single off the Warehouse double, says it all – the chill of awe instead of the fire of passion, frost instead of flesh, the ghost of folk instead of the residue of R&B. Pop ’87’s aerobic humanism can’t take on this kind of enchantment.

But what do they think is the most unique thing they offer?

Grant: "The outlook, I guess... we’re creating music for human beings, not pop idols."

Bob: "I don’t see many people trying to be as honest as we are... I think the lyrics are enlightening without being too philosophical... I don’t think you associate a clothing style or a lifestyle with what we do... in that sense we’re not exclusive to anyone, we don’t exclude."

Do you agree that part of the appeal of being a band is the chance to prolong adolescence, to leave things open a little longer, to avoid the closures of adulthood?

Grant: "Well, there’s growing up and there’s growing boring, and the two are not necessarily inseparable. Generally, though, as a person gets established in their life, and the things that surround them are theirs rather than their parents’, they start to settle down. I see friends that are worrying about their bank overdrafts – all the things I worry about too, but not to the exclusion of everything else. And the next step is that you start playing the game, kissing up to the boss, all to ensure the security you’re afraid to lose. But what you do lose is the ability to live for the moment, because life gets so bound up with planning and providence. People get conservative as they look to preserving their life investment."

One of the first things to go when this settling down sets in, is music, or at least rock of the Husker Du ilk. People cease to be able to take on such music. It’s too demanding – literally, in terms of investment of energy and attention; but also in the sense that rock is like a reproach, can get to be an unwelcome nagging reminder of dreams that have been foregone. It becomes unbearable to listen to music, after a while.

Bob: "Well, almost everyone does give up music, sooner or later – it’s a matter of when..."

Grant: "But there are those who give everything up all the time and right from the start. So even to hold out for a while is not so bad."

Who do they feel are their kindred spirits in rock?

Bob: "Who’s at Number 186 in the Billboard Chart this week, ha ha ha ha! No, there are some like-minded groups about, groups that have abandoned the idea of pop stardom – we’ve even been accused of triggering that off... bands like R.E.M., Meat Puppets, Black Flag... bands who can be widely successful in their own minds because of the psychic rewards of what they do. A band like R.E.M. that has a very internally run programme – they’ve got a manager that’s been with them since day one, they’re very homebase-oriented, having refused to move to New York or L.A. Similarly, we decided to stay in Minneapolis right from the start. Now things are turned around so that a friend of a friend knows a musician who moved from Hollywood to Minneapolis, in order to be discovered!

"I like the fact that we’re self-sufficient, that we look after our own finances, that we don’t have a set regimen dictated by a corporation or anybody. One of the results of the life we lead is that we don’t divide work and play. When I’m not working on music or doing specific administrative tasks, I’m writing or reading or drawing, but all these things have an input into the music."

How do you want people to be affected by the music?

Grant: "This may sound a little overwhelming, but I’d like them to come out a better person than when they came in, as a result of an effort by both audience and the performers. We’re appreciated by a different enough range of people – rednecks, hippies, punks, 50-year-old jazz buffs – that I personally am really satisfied that there’s so much love going down. I’m also proud of the pride we take in what we do... I wish they made drums like that!"

Is there a kind of politics in Husker Du, in that you deal with the discrepancy between the promise of America and most people’s lived reality of deadlock and impasse?

"There’s politics in the sense of people trying to gain control of their own destiny. Life is too short to worry about who’s on top at any given time – politics is like advertising, the basic products beneath the different wrappers are much the same – it’s more important to avoid being stepped on, to find a life that doesn’t involve a giant foot hovering over your head perpetually. The golden rule is: be neither a foot over someone’s head, nor a head under someone’s foot."

And are there ‘spiritual’ concerns, too?

Bob: "I’m a questioning person. I’d like to find out why certain things are the way they are and, if that’s spiritual, then I’m a spiritual person. Things like time interest me. I overheard a guy on the airplane saying that the Japanese are 25 years ahead of us. Now which 25 years did he mean – 1780 to 1805, or 1962 to 1987? How do you qualify time? Is time the same for a guy aged 25 who’s never eaten meat and for a guy of the same age who’s taken speed for the last 10 years..."

Grant: "In hamburgers!"

Bob: "A good question is so much better than a bad answer. If you had all the answers, why go on? There goes all your spirit, your reason for living."

Husker
Du

Candy Apple Grey

Melody Maker, March 22nd 1986

by Simon Reynolds

Listening to this vast, volatile music, up in its power and space, I suddenly realised
that these attributes are the precise opposite of the experiences Husker Du
actually sing about — the lived reality of inertia, claustrophobia,
isolation. The paradox of transfiguration — Husker Du's music wrenches numbness
into fury and exultation. Only the Smiths make an equivalent alchemy of the
grey areas of existence.

The Byrdsy harmonies, the desolate purity of Hart and Mould's voices, a discreet
trippiness, these are further clues. Husker Du (like the Smiths) use traces of
folk, a roots music, to write songs about rootlessness. Both groups look to the
‘60s only to reinvoke what's most positive about the time — doubt about the
costs of living a normal life, yearning for an indefinable more.

Husker Du's
music trembles with all the nameless longings that ache beneath the skin.
Sometimes they remind me of the Jimi Hendrix Experience — another power trio of
virtuoso ability who created a rock noise that was spiritual. And I wonder if
Husker Du's 'Somewhere' was our lost 'I Don't Live Today'.

But Husker
Du have an ascetic quality that contrasts with Hendrix's febrile sensuality —
their music rises above the body, refuses to solicit it (says don't dance, flip
your wig). Their love songs are chaste devotionals, almost hymnal. Husker Du
approach the world, and their loves, with a mixture of pained bewilderment and
awe. Their flight from the flesh is the only response to pop's soulless,
sweaty sextravaganza.

I think
also of another ‘60s-obsessed group. Where the Jesus And Mary Chain make pop
fresh again by juxtaposing its sweetness with noise, Husker Du turn pop into
noise — flaying these songs into a haze, smudging voice into guitar.

The feared
corporate bland-out has not happened. There's a touch more clarity, a few more
ballads. But this was coming anyway — Husker Du had taken velocity and noise as
far as they could. The only way forward for them is to become gentler. Husker
Du's achievement is a musical violence untainted with machismo: a violence
that, paradoxically, heals. All they've done is to bring out more clearly the
grace and compassion that always did rage at the heart of their ravaged sound.

Besides,
these soft songs are the cruellest. No music mangles my heart so completely.
The intimacy of 'Hardly Getting Over It' almost destroys. 'Eiffel Tower High'
features a sublime loop of melody that will crush the breath out of you.

There's
never been anything cultish or difficult about Husker Du — please don't deny
yourself this beauty any longer. For I don't know how much longer it can last —
already Husker Du repeat themselves, musically and lyrically.

For the moment,
though, I live for this pain.

HUSKER DU

Warehouse: Songs and Stories (WEA)

Melody Maker, July 1987

by Simon Reynolds

This is ROCK. Not
rock’n’roll, not swingin’, groovy, lean and compact. Not even raunch. this is
ROCK -- powerchords that would crack apart the sky. Husker Du don’t belong with
the new authentics, bar bands sweating out a closeknit clinch with their fans.
Unlike Springsteen (who by sheer presence can shrink stadiums back to the
dimensions of the primal R&B joint), there’s no intimacy, no sweat, nothing
earthy. Husker Du are making a
monument, a mountain, a glacier, out of rock again, rather than burrowing along
at grass roots.

Oblivion. “Nothing
changes fast enough/Your hurry worry days/It makes you want to give it up/And
drift into a haze”--“These Important Years.” Rock noise is the uptight white
adolescent’s release, emptying the mind, then filling it with nothing but its
own dancing frenzy. Noise as metaphor for inner turmoil and its transfiguration.
Over five LPs (and this is their second
double) Husker Du have turned over and over the details of drift and
bewilderment, yet still manage to
wrest an improbably grandeur from the small squalor of everyday inertia. Fuck
the chirpy, unforgiveable “Road to
Nowhere”-- this is the true, hurting sound of the spirit chafing against the
rut of existence, chafing at the intractable. The “violence” of this music is
an attempt to flay past numbness, through dulled senses, to reawaken feeling.

“Think with your hips”
has been the message of rock’n’roll, of pop. But this rock says: rise above,
kiss the sky. Like U2/REM/J&MC, this music is psychedelia without drugs, a
rock that has left behind loins, juice, even heat, and found a new, frosty kind
of intensity. A celestial impulse.

This is a new sound.
Heavy metal is bastardized R&B, R&B sexuality coarsened and stiffened
and blunt. But Husker Du “bastardize” or metallize folk. They strip folk of
roots and soil, blast it to the heavens. Imagine the Jimi Hendrix Experience
playing The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday.

Better than ever.
Voices midway between scar and balm, savaging as they soothe. Harmonies that
swell, soar, then bleed into the horizon. Divine lullabies like “Up in the
Air,” cracked apart by blocks of noise. “No Reservation,” “She’s A Woman,” “You
Can Live At Home,” “Friend,” “You’re A Soldier,” “Ice Cold Ice”…classic pop
structures, almost borne under by the foaming weight of noise brought to bear.

My fantasy. A million
heads wigging out, blissed out, in rock noise. A soulboy’s bad dream. Style,
rhetoric, tassled loafers, import 12-inches, blown, scattered to the winds. A
million heads, lost in music, in worship. The return of ROCK.

Friday, March 25, 2016

My contributions to the The Wire's 100 Records That Shook The World feature from 1991 or 92

Remember feeling at the time that I had been given some rather obvious ones to handle - not that they don't deserve to be in the 100, all Fabulous and Important of course. But there were other ones I'd coveted doing that had been bagged by others. I appear to have been tasked here with dealing with Canonical Rock.

The List as a whole is top stuff, good mix of Obvious/Inevitable/Indispensable and Surprising. Looking at it again today, I'm surprised by how there is still quite a bit on the list that I've even now, 25 years later, not got around to hearing.

Friday, March 11, 2016

There’s probably any number of fabulous riffs strewn across the discographies of the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction label-cluster (Maurizio’s “M6” and Monolake’s “Index” spring immediately to mind). But “1.2” by the enigmatic Resilient takes the BC/CR approach of miniaturising the riff to the limit. Riffs exist at the intersection of melody and rhythm, the mnemonic and the physical, and the Chain Reaction aesthetic in part involved seeing just how reduced (in terms of notes) you could make a pulse before it became purely percussive, just another beat. I’m not even sure there’s notes as such in “1.2”, it’s more like this spasming ripple of texture. It’s as if Resilient has conducted an archaeology of house music in order to uncover the primordial geocosmic vamp at the genre’s core. The first half of “1.2” consists of a tectonic shudder, a tidal current, that’s so contourless it’s at the very threshold of memorability. Then roughly six minutes in (you do tend to lose track of time) it abruptly shifts gear to a more rapid flicker of amorphous radiance. At which point, the sensation of spongy amniotic suspension quickens to a flooding bliss, overwhelming enough to get your eyes rolling back in your head. You start to see why Kevin Martin dubbed this genre “heroin house”.

[from The Wire's Greatest Riffs feature - The Wire, 2004]

CHAIN REACTION / BASIC CHANNEL

Dance column, Spin 1998

by Simon Reynolds

PORTER RICKS Biokinetics

VAINQUEUR Elevations

MAURIZIO untitled CD

VARIOUS ARTISTS Decay Product

MONOLAKE Hongkong

Think "house," and in your mind's ear you'll probably hear a thudding, metronomic kick-drum and a shrieking soul-diva. Nearly fifteen years on from its Chicago genesis, house has evolved way beyond this original, winning formula, and diversified into at least a dozen subgenres. From the disco cut-up style popularised by Daft Punk to the unhinged abstraction of nu skool Chicago label Relief, the most exciting contemporary house is designed for"track-heads"--purist connoisseurs who prefer minimal tracks to anthemic songs. I don't like purists either, but if the truth be known, when pop music's final reckoning is done, house is not going to be remembered for adding to the sum of"great songs," nor for its pantheon of distinctive vocalists. Its real contribution and innovation resides

elsewhere.

In this spirit, the Berlin label Chain Reaction have distilled house down to its essence: no songs, no vocals, barely any melodies, sometimes not even a beat. What, you might wonder, is left after such

ruthless pruning? Texture and pulse-rhythm. Or more precisely, texture-rhythm as an indivisible plasma-like substance that is molded and extruded through dub-space. Take Chain Reaction's aesthetic pinnacle to date, "Resilient 1.2": a slow-motion tsunamai ofego-melting,

body-boundary-haemorrhaging bliss. Following Kevin Martin's coinage, people have started to calll the Chain Reaction sound "heroin house"; "Resilient 1.2" actually reminds me of Velvet Underground's "Heroin". A soundtrack in waiting for the first zero-gravity nightclub, it was my favourite track of 1997; you can find it on the Chain Reaction CD Decay Product, a compilation of tracks by the production team Various Artists.

Based out of Berlin's Hard Wax record store, Chain Reaction is the sister label of Basic Channel, whose nine 12-inch releases were the toast of techno-house cognoscentithroughout the mid-Nineties (but don't let that put you off!). Devoted to vinyl, the mysterious figures behind the twin labels established their own pressing plant. This makes Chain Reaction's series of single-artist CD compilations--encased in striking metal cans that resemble DJs's record boxes--a sort of ideological lapse, a concession to the market realities of the digital era.

Prise open the cannisters, and on tracks like Maurizio's "M6", Vainqueur's "Reduce 2" and Porter Ricks' "Port Gentil" you'll encounter electronic music as warmly cocooning and spongy as the lining of the womb. What initially sounds monotonous reveals itself as an endlessly inflected, fractal mosaic ofglow-pulses and flicker-riffs. Using studio-processes like EQ, filtering, phasing and panning to tweak the frequencies and stereo-imaging of their sonic motifs, CR artists weave tantalising

tapestries whose strands shift in and out of the aural spotlight. The effect is synaesthetic, like fingertips tremulously caressing your neck.

Although CR artists would probably distance themselves from rave's drug culture, their music sounds like Ecstasy sensations encoded in sound, abstracted into a velcro-sticky audio-fabric that tugs at your skin-surface and gets your goosebumps rippling in formation. Melody is minimal--limited

to rudimentary vamps and ostinatos--because it's just a device for displaying sound-in-itself. Simple motifs twist the timbre-fabric in order to best show off its properties, making you thrill to the scintillating play ofcreases and folds, crinkles and kinks.

CR music isn't all opiated oblivion: Monolake's "Lantau" and "Macau" are like Cantonese reggae, while Porter Ricks material often has an abrasive industrial tinge,reflecting the fact that one half of the duo is acclaimed ambient experimentalist Thomas Koner. But my favorite CR output

is the stuff that offers a sublime surrogate for MDMA experience, a bliss-space you can access at any time then leave, without cost or comedown. That said, this music's appealextends way beyond ravers--anyone who's ever swooned to neo-psychelicists like Spacemen 3 and My Bloody

that should seduce any hesitant psych-guitar fiends into taking the plunge.

PORTER RICKS,

live at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage

Village Voice, Tuesday, Jul 3 2001

by Simon Reynolds

No doubt about it, the Brooklyn BridgeAnchorage is an amazing space. As a music venue, though, this gloomy maze of looming, steep-sided chambers leaves a lot to be desired: Performers tend to drown in a quagmire of reflected sound. On June 28, the final installment of Creative Time's annual series of avant-electronica events (a 10th birthday bash for Frankfurt's Force Inc and its sister label, Mille Plateaux) saw some groups faring better with the acoustics than others. Panacea's 180-b.p.m. Gothkore bombast suited the medieval ambience, but Kid606's set was too busy and event-crammed (Boredoms do IDM) to thrive in this catacomb. SND suffered from the opposite syndrome: Too sparse even for the Anchorage, they sounded like an ailing metronome trapped in an echo chamber.

But that's no preparation for how hard they rocked tonight: Imagine Eno's On Land meets the Stooges. Porter Ricks use a guitar processor on all their synth sounds, which helps explains the added grit in their grind. Early in the set, the songs felt like spelunking through spongy-walled caverns flushed with foamy water: total body-massage. But as the beat got steadily more bangin' and the texture-riffs flared fierce like magnesium, Porter Ricks hit a sublime pitch midway between warm pulse and cold rush: a sound as visceral as hardcore, as sensuous as deep house, as abstract as glitch. The combination of this glorious roar and the Anchorage's architecture was like being teleported through time-space to Berlin's legendary early-'90s club E-Werk, a disused power plant. Finally, the Anchorage became the rave temple it has always promised to be

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

The host: Moving Shadow, the UK's leading "intelligent hardcore" label. The line-up: jungle's top DJs, including the ubiquitous Randall, Grooverider, Ray Keith, Brockie and LTJ Bukem, plus PA's from Moving Shadow's three most popular artists, Foul Play, Omni Trio and Deep Blue. The venue: Equinox, a slightly cheesy disco on Leicester Square usually full of tourists, whose balconies and upholstered alcoves provide welcome rest and respite for the combat-fatigued and shellshocked.

For hardcore is warzone music; its jagged breakbeats are treacherous, a simulation of the minefield that is modern life. Hardcore strafes the listener's body with percussion, so that dancing is like striding into a stream of machine-gun snares and ricocheting paradiddles, while bass-bombs send shockwaves through your intestines. But, with Moving Shadow's brand of hardcore, the danger-beats are incongruously swathed with soothing, silken tenderness: strings, harps, jazz-fusion chords, soul-diva sighs and gasps, plus the kind of woogly textures you'd usually hear from The Irresistible Force.

This "ambient hardcore" sound was traiblazed on tracks like "Music" by LTJ Bukem (who plays a brilliant set, finding an extra five notches of volume to really detonate the night) and "Open Your Mind" by FOUL PLAY. Sadly, FP don't include this sublime song in their PA, but they do debut their fab new single ["Being With You"], all phuture-jazz synth-clusters and diva beseechings, while lazers scythe and slash the crowd. Foul Play also 'play' their remix of Hyper-On-Experience's "Lords Of the Null Lines", demonstrating how fluid the notion of 'authorship' is in this scene, where an anthem's life is prolonged by endless, drastically altered versions.

After Bukem's set, Andy C keeps the music rollin'. Junglists and junglettes do a palsied version of 'steppers', originally a roots reggae dance that involves skipping on the spot like a manic jig'n'reel. But with jungle, it's like they're Morris-dancing on bullets. The crowd tonight mixes chic, style-conscious sophisticates (usually black or Asian) and dressed-down white kids who mostly look like they're well under the 18 age limit emblazoned on the flyer. There's all sorts here tonight, friendly luv'd up types who probably secretly mourn the days of "happy 'ardcore", and the moody, self-contained junglists into dark tunes, who despise the rave ethos with its Vicks, white gloves and gushing euphoria.

OMNI TRIO hit the stage, or rather a proxy does, since the true creator behind this country's sublimest dance-pop is a 38 year old Can fan who prefers to remain an enigma. The stand-in pretends to knob-twiddle as Omni's classic "Renegade Snares" tears up the floor, with its soul-shocking cannonades of polyrhythm, hypergasmic chorus "c'mon, take me UP!" and sentimental verging on twee piano motif. Then the MC announces "the one 'n' only, the livin' legend", DEEP BLUE. The latter is a unassuming bloke whose "The Helicopter Tune" is still massive after 6 months floor-life. Recently reissued with 4 remixes, it sold 22 thousand and became the first hardcore track to go Top 70 in years. Based around a geometric Latin beat cranked up like some crazed clockwork mechanism, "Helicopter" gets the crowd seething like a cauldron.

A few hours later, we stumble bleary and squinting into a viciously crisp dawn, battered and bruised but still glowing with the beauty-terrorism of "Voodoo Magic."

MOVING SHADOW

Melody Maker, 1994

by Simon Reynolds

"If 'intelligent' means that we don't
just go along with the norm, then
yeah, we're 'intelligent hardcore'," says Rob Playford, boss of
Moving Shadow. "We're always trying to push

the frontiers
back a bit, we never put out a track just 'cos it's
current.We're right at the front of the
scene, so we're able to
jump just a few weeks ahead of the game. 'Cos that's how fast
things move in hardcore."

Playford founded Moving Shadow in
1990. His background as a hip hop DJ
came through in breakbeat-driven tracks like "Waremouse"
and "Bombscare" by 2 Bad Mice (which was Playford

and two pals).
"Waremouse", with its metallic, machine-gun snare sound,
pioneered the drum-&-bass style of today's hardcore, and is
still being sampled.In '92, 2 Bad
Mice's "Hold It
Down/Waremouse" and its remix EP sequel sold 32,000 in total; the
label also scored a Number One in the National Dance Chart with
Blame's "Music Takes You", an early hardcore classic, all
helium-shrill vocals and jittery oscillator-riffs.Moving Shadow was on the map.

In '93, Playford started putting out tunes
like Omni Trio's
"Mystic Stepper" and "Renegade Snares", Foul Play's "Open Your
Mind", and Hyper-On-Experience's "Lords Of The

Null Lines".
These tracks trailblazed the genre of 'ambient/intelligent'
hardcore that's now in the ascendant, and established
the Moving Shadow logo as a seal of quality.

Being a pragmatic businessman as well as a
musician has allowed Playford
to strike a fine balance between artistic progress and
dancefloor currency. "'Cos you can get too far ahead, get so
abstract that people can't get into it. A label like Reinforced
is almost like hardcore's research lab,

trying out way
out ideas. But you need to improve your artistic-ness and
still survive as a business."

Moving Shadow has its own
research-and-development program: the
"Two On One" series of EP's, where two different artists (usually
guest acts not signed to Moving Shadow) get experimental.Playford's mini-empire now extends to rave promotion (the
recent "Voodoo Magic" bash), retail (a King's Rd store called
Section 5), and a subsidiary 'compilation' label Reanimate
whose debut offering "Renegade Selector Issue One" has
just been released.Another triumph for
the label

is Deep Blue's
"The Helicopter Tune", which sold 22, 000 and became the first
hardcore tune to crack the Top 70 in two years.All this means that Moving Shadow are well
placed to reap the benefit
of jungle's imminent commercial breakthrough.Playford, though, is wary.

"What the media and the record biz
have picked up on as 'jungle' is what
we in the scene would call 'ragga-jungle'. I'm surprised
it's taken so long for the majors to pick up on the ragga-jungle,
'cos it's so saleable. With that M-Beat/General Levy
track, there's a front person, a focal point, whereas
ours is more of an engineer's music. Hardcore's
totally different from the rest of the music industry 'cos
it's not showbiz, it's full of normal people. There's no band
loyalty, because there's nothing to follow--

no posters,
nothing to read about in teeny mags."

Playford expects the ragga-jungle craze to
blow up massively, then
blow over by Christmas. Meanwhile, the intelligent
element will bide their time and reap the long- term
dividend.They'll stay true to the music
and continue to evolve.
Already some Moving Shadow artists--Omni Trio,

Hyper-On-Experience--are
working on full-length albums of 'armchair
hardcore'.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

The Style Council

The Cost Of Loving (Polydor)

Melody Maker, February 7th, 1987

by Simon Reynolds

A remarkable fellow, this Paul Weller. It's a strange journey he's made over the last decade, but stranger still is that he's managed to take the greater part of his audience along with him. Somehow he's managed to lead one of the most entrenched examples of playsafe rock consensus "forward" into (apparently) loving music that sounds just like Con Funk Shun, Rah Band, Loose Ends...

The problem is that Weller, ever earnest, has internalised too thoroughly the edict Rock Is Dead. For every past powerchord and epic gesture he now endeavours to atone, publicly, by the slavish imitation of the most slick and redundant aspects of contemporary black music. Once he believed The Jam was the true sound of "when you're young"; now he's "wised up", got hip to the fact that where the "real kids" are at is... Robbie Vincent, LWR, all the loathsome details of fake sophistication ("light those candles... open the freezer door").

Weller has simply transposed one "reality" of English suburbia for another, the smalltown smallness of 'English Rose', 'That's Entertainment', 'Smithers-Jones' (mod-derived), updated to a world of winebars and nightclubs. But is deference to "reality" such a good thing anyway? What exactly is of value or interest in this world of spivs, this nouveau riche Southern heartland of Thatcherism?

The Cost Of Loving sees Weller severing himself, finally, from the Sixties. The music is a surprisingly accurate imitation of that most toothless, spineless idiom, Brit-Funk... Philly pastiches, jazz-funk ballads, Street Sounds stuff... none of which approaches the real mindless ecstacy of disco. It's irretrievable naffness can be conveyed in only two words... Junior Giscombe. Songcraft, good intentions, the anxiety to avoid love clichés... all these are the very death of disco.

Worse still is when Weller attempts to remotivate the sound of Saturday Nite, make it bear the burden of his meaning well; for the music is born down by the grey spirit of New Society. I liked them more when The Style Council played with pop history, assembled their own fantasy of "perfect pop" out of Philly, Blue Note, Left Bank, Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Dear old Paul Weller. We're all on the same side. No doubt I'll be voting Labour with exactly the same mixture of dutiful resignation and frustration that there's no more incandescent alternative, as him. I even have a sneaking affection for the man. But the sad fact is that even if it is possible to achieve a co-incidence between desire and responsibility, ecstasy and concern, Weller is incapable of such a balance.

The problem is the fundamental modesty of his aspiration, of his person – those unvoluptuous good looks. Within The Redskins' drastically curtailed emotional range they worked, because there's a potential for romance in street fighting and revolution. But... how can you make the Labour Party seem exciting? That's the flaw in Red Wedge – their chiding logic of pragmatism ("as good as we'll get... let's face facts") is in fundamental antagonism to pop's intolerant utopianism.

On this album there's a track recorded with "homegrown" rappers The Dynamic Three; 'Right To Go' is a vote registration rap. It's dated, flailing and useless, hardly crucial or fresh (is there any more hopeless bandwagon than British soul and hip hop?) but the real problem is: how can you conceivably make trudging through the wet leaves and puddles to your local primary school, in order to tick a piece of paper in a polling booth, seem like a glamorous and dynamic act of self-realisation, or even solidarity? You can't.This reissue also dedicated toKoushik Banerjea and Partha Banerjea - nuff respeck from "The Information Centre" ;)

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

White English pop is in a sorry state
these days. From the Swinging London fixations of Blur, through the mod revivalism of the New
Wave Of New Wave, to Smiths-retreads like Echobelly and Gene, nostalgia is the
order of the day. Drawing on an ever
more circumscribed and depleted range of whiter-than-white influences--The Who,
the Jam, Bowie, that most insular and parochial of artists, Morrissey-- bands
hark back to the lost golden age of
Brit-pop.

So it's hardly surprising, that the only
truly vibrant music in this country is that which reflects, rather than denies,
the multiracial, culturally promiscuous nature of '90s Britain.

Take jungle, a
frenetic hybrid of hip hop, reggae and techno with a black-and-white underclass
following. And look at the rise of Asian
rap groups like Fun-Da-Mental and Asian
ragga-dancehall artists like Apache Indian.

The latter may soon be joined in the charts by Bally Sagoo, Asian pop's hottest dance producer. I talk to 30 year old Bally during a hiatus
in the shooting of a video, at a converted church in Crouch End that's now Dave
Stewart's recording studio. It's Bally's first video, and it's for a
breathtakingly pretty song called "Chura Liya" that could be his
breakthrough into the mainstream.

Born in New Delhi, Bally was six months
old when his parents emigrated to England, and has lived in Birmingham all his
life. Music is in his blood: his father played in one of the first Asian bands
in Britain, the Musafirs, "a sort of an Asian version of The
Shadows". But Bally never really cared for traditional Indian music as a
boy, preferring the "hardcore street sounds" of electro and hip hop.
Now almost every genre of studio-concocted state-of-art dance informs his sound,
from house and techno to ragga and jungle.

Throughout the '80s, Bally honed his
production skills, remixing bhangra tunes and giving them the kind of
turbo-charged "beef" that he heard in Western dance music.

"To be
honest, I basically changed the whole of the Indian music industry, by bringing
in samplers and sequencers and modern beats".

In 1990, he started making his own music, and
has since released six albums that each sold over 100 thousand copies. After
last year's 'greatest hits' compilation "On The Mix" (through Island
's sub-label Mango), Bally signed to Sony in a massive deal that's potentially
worth 1.2 million. Now label, management and artist are all holding their
breath to see if Bally's past sales and
fan-base can translate into chart positions.

"My goal, and I keep my fingers
crossed and pray to God, is to see an Asian language song in the charts,"
says Bally earnestly. "Then you could really say, 'doors have been broken
down'. I don't wanna hear any crap about how people won't like it cos they
don't understand the words, cos there's been loads of foreign language
hits."

"Chura" was originally written by
the late R.D. Burnam, one of the subcontinent's most famous songwriters and
'musical directors'. Bally went to India to get it resung, then took the vocal
back to his Birmingham studio and framed it in a "'90s ragga sound, with a
hardcore rude-boy B-line". As well as the romantic Hindi vocals, there's
a rap from Cheshire Cat, a white Brummie who chats in a thick Jamaican patois,
raggamuffin-style.

"Chura" is a taster for the album "Bollywood Connection",
named after Indian's motion picture capital. "The album consists of eight
superhits from the last twenty years. I do a kind of Jurassic Park thing,
bringing these dead and buried songs back to life".

Although Bally's a
Punjabi Sikh himself, he chose to work with Hindi singers. "You're
conquering a bigger market with Hindi.
Bengalis, Sikhs, Muslims, they all listen to Hindi songs, whereas
Punjabi bangra is more of a specialist scene."

Much of Bally's talk is of conquering
markets and how Asian music has yet to be "exploited properly". When
I suggest that even though "Chura" is a love song, its success might
have a political dimension--demonstrating to the racists and BNP that Britain
is now a multicultural society, that there's no going back--he shrugs. It's
clear that Bally's main interest in crossover isn't cultural integration so
much as maximum market penetration. He's an ambitious fellow who aspires to the
first rank of world-class dance producers--David Morales, Jazzy B (Soul II Soul),
Paul Oakenfold, Jam & Lewis, Teddy Riley--and is tired of being ghettoised
as an Asian artist.

He's also frustrated with the limits of the Asian market,
where 80 percent of sales are cheaply priced cassettes, and there's a massive
problem with bootlegging. (He tells me how one scoundrel in Canada sold 200
thousand pirate copies of one of his albums).

But Bally's transition to the mainstream
might not be that smooth, owing to the peculiarites of the Asian record
industry. Most Indian music is sold through cornershops, which is why Bally's
huge sales have hitherto failed to translate into hits (they've bypassed the
chart-return shops). Can Bally and his record company persuade Asian youth to
go into Our Price and HMV? And will Asian kids, who are used to paying 2-50 for
a cassette album be prepared to cough up eight, nine, ten quid?

It's a gamble for both Bally and Columbia,
but the stakes are high: it could be that Asian music will
have the same influence on '90s pop that Jamaican reggae did on the Seventies.
(Who knows, by the end of the century, maybe there'll be massive-selling white
bhangra bands, a la The Police and UB40...)

"Nobody can tell what's going to
happen in the future. We just have to hope that the public can accept this
music and bring it to the same level that house, ragga, techno, are at the
moment. It shouldn't be a specialist
thing, it should be up there, loud and proud. Specialist just doesn't make
sense."